Search

Mysteries of France

19 April 2018

Investigative journalists at The Fifth Estate have done a fascinating documentary on a disputed Modigliani which the Panama Papers revealed was in the possession of one of the most powerful art dealing families in the world. Anyone interested in art history and provenance could learn a lot, and lovers of Modigliani will certainly enjoy the unwrapping of this mystery.

There is, in addition, an interesting local history connection. The sitter for this beautiful portrait by Modigliani was Georges Menier, who lived in Lognes, a pretty town in the eastern banlieue of Paris of which he was the mayor. He belonged to the great Menier chocolate-making family.

25 March 2018

In Google's study Three years of the Right to be Forgotten, the search engine giant reports receiving delisting requests for 2,367,380 URLS of which 20% "related to news outlets and government websites that in a majority of cases covered a requester’s legal history."

A very small number of requestors, mostly reputation management agencies and lawfirms, accounted for a very large number of requests. Google refers to these as "high volume requestors": 0.25% (one fourth of one percent) of requesters "generated 14.6% of requests and 20.8% of delistings."

source: Three Years of the Right to be Forgotten, page 2

Google accepted 43% of delisting requests.

Today, when you perform a search in Europe, you will frequently see the message: "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe."

It is impossible to find out who requested the removal, what (if anything) was removed or why - even when it is a search for a Nazi war criminal that produces the message.

There is no transparency. No external audit. No Freedom of Information Requests. No way to know the identity of the person or - as is frequently the case - professional Reputation Management Company that filed the request. There is no way to know the identity of the individual who decides what to remove.

When the Right to Be Forgotten, championed by European Commissionner Viviane Reding, was decided by the European Court in May of 2014, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia predicted "memory holes". This is precisely what is happening.

To find out whether your search results might be compromised, launch a search and scroll down to the bottom of the page to check.

This is clearly a story that deserves much more attention than it has received.

***

Bing has removed 23,895 URLs from its search engine ( out of 62,027 URLs requested for removal) in accordance with Europe's 2014 Right To Be Forgotten.

France, the UK and Germany account for the lion's share of requests. It is not reported how many of the URLs concern news or official government sites.

01 June 2017

24 May 2017

Heartbreaking.

Another terrorist attack in the heart of Europe. The target this time: young girls. It is beyond heartbreaking. In solidarity with the grieving people of Manchester and the world, the Eiffel tower goes dark. We cannot help but be reminded of the Berlin Christmas Market attack, the Nice Attacks, the Paris Attacks to name only three among dozen of Islamist attacks in the months since the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

France continues to be in an official State of Emergency (more than a year now) and the US State Department continues to issue travel warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks in Europe. And Islamists "known to intelligence services" and even convicted of crimes, jailed and released, continue to travel freely into and throughout Europe, as the sheer numbers of people on watchlists overwhelm European security forces. There is no positive message here. How can there be a positive message when a girl of eight is murdered for attending a concert with her mother and sister? Europe is failing to protect itself and children are paying the price.

19 July 2016

July 14, 2016: Nice, France. Bastille Day

The drop that makes the vase overflow. The straw that breaks the camel's back. The beyond words disgusting terrorist attack in Nice is just the latest in a long and painful series of massacres fueled by the unchecked spread of radical Islam in France. In Nice, grief-stricken and furious mourners joined together for a minute of silence. The Prime Minister of France was booed. Unheard of. Incredible. And yet, completely understandable.

France is angry. Deeply, profoundly angry. Four years after the massacre of little children in Toulouse, 18 months after the slaughter of satirical cartoonists in the center of Paris, seven months after the Bataclan and other atrocities, a violent and perverse Tunisian with criminal convictions and a residency permit, plotted the murder of families enjoying the summer evening of July 14th in Nice. There were a half dozen ways this attack could have been prevented, but it was not.

And President François Hollande thinks he's doing ok.

The French trusted their government to put serious measures into place to fight the spreading menace of radicalized Islamists. And it is now dawning on everyone that this trust has been tragically misplaced.

Deploying a level of cynicism unlike any that I have ever seen in thirty years in France, François Hollande deliberately hamstrung his own ministers, in a Machiavellian play of divide and conquer, that ensured that nothing would be done, other than to exhaust the police, kept running by an army of repeat offenders who should not have been out on the streets at all, thanks to the unparalleled incompetence of the government and its failure to enact coherent policy of any kind.

There is, to this day, no policy concerning jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. No solution of the 10,000+ people referenced as security risks - a number too high to keep track of. No new prisons to hold the petty criminals, like the killer of Nice, who blend into the massive crowd of other petty criminals. No sustained policy of expulsion of foreign nationals convicted of crimes. No review of family reunification (regroupement familiale) as the main source of immigration. No change in the grotesque laxity in sentencing of recidivist criminals. No real strengthening of the intelligence community. And on and on. Instead there is a permanent State of Emergency in which constitutional rights are suspended while CGT activists block roads with impunity, casseurs abuse the police and terrorists roam free.

After the tearful solidarity that brought masses into the street following the shock of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations, France is experiencing an unprecedented swell of anger which threatens to become a tsunami if no vessel is found that can contain or channel it.

La goutte d'eau qui fait déborder le vase.

===

NEW: Major French newspapers including Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro are reporting that the French government lied about the security arrangements. After published reports saying that only one municipal police car - and no National Police - blocked the entrance to the Promenade des Anglais, the Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, officially opened an inquiry by the "Police of the Police" into the security arrangements.

NEW: In the week since this post was written, Europe has seen five more murderous attacks. Wuerzberg (axe on a train: Afghan or Pakistani), Ansbach (bomb in backpack: Syrian), Munich (gun: German-Iranian), Reutlingen (machete: Syrian); and today, Saint Etienne de Rouvray (knife beheading of priest: French on terror watchlist)

22 June 2016

Once again, French high school students have launched a petition to protest the content of the English test on the French BAC high school leaving exam. This time (2016) the problem is the use of the word Manhattan. The testers assumed that all students would know that it belongs in New York, but many did not, and felt that it was unfair to base their English language results on trivia known to some but not to others. The petition immediately gathered more than 12,000 signatures.

All this reminds me of last year's debate, when the petition (which gathered even more signatures) concerned questions that were also criticized as unclear, even to native English speakers (not that that matters, mind you).

I wrote about it at the time, but then didn't publish thinking "well, this will never happen again!"

Wrong.

So, only a year late, here's an essay on last year's petition against the English exam.

04 June 2016

Politics aside, the situation of the migrants in Calais is catastrophic.

Writer Christine Buckley is helping to organize a fundraising party and auction today at Chez Grace, 46 rue des Abbesses, Paris 75018, from 2pm until late, with music and entertainment. The goal is to collect funds to help two of the associations that provide humanitarian aid to the people caught in the no man's land of Calais.